More particularly, when I feel someone has hurt me, I become like my Dad.

What a classic case of becoming like the person you’d least like to model yourself after. I’m completely blown over. (1)

I see that I took movies in my head of how Dad behaved with other people and marked them “Do Not Copy.” But that warning label must have faded with time or fallen completely off because now what I do is indeed copy his behavior. Not consciously. Not even perceptibly.

But it’s getting harder and harder to deny the facts, as I present like him more and more over time and the facts become seen.

To see it (2) was so difficult. It’s all so well justified, deniable and righteous.

Finally seeing and acknowledging it was a huge shock for me (probably one of the shifts that AAM has been midwifing).

In the face of perceived hurt or threat, I resort to the behavior that my Dad would’ve resorted to.I go on automatic and become a self-defense machine. I become my Dad. And it leads to loss of support, alienation, superficiality, and downright not caring.

There are so many ways a person’s mission could fail. The usual way is from sexual misconduct. But irritability must come a close second.

So that’s what drove Dad. He undoubtedly copied it from his Dad, who was truly a piece of work.

And now I’ve copied it from him. Neither of us probably knew what had happened.

Do I know what to do next? No. Is there something to do next? I don’t know that either. I’m sure he never saw what he was up to or where he got it from.

I feel a modicum of joy returning. However, based on the crises that I seem to go through practically every day (equipment failures, property losses, dropped balls of many kinds), I’m pretty sure more core issues remain. Never in my life has there been such concentrated loss and it can’t be coincidental.

When one raises a whole line of conduct to awareness, is there more to do? Not on the awareness path. The simple act of raising something to awareness makes it an order of magnitude more difficult to repeat the behavior so change happens naturally.

I’ve now got the knowledge that I’ve become my Dad up to realization. Hopefully, that and vigilance are all that’s needed.

Starting this week, I’ll be taking Monday and Tuesday off on a regular basis.

Footnotes

(1) Notice that yesterday, when this knowledge was still mostly intellectual and a tiny bit experiential, what I was seeing was merely interesting. But today, when it “hit me” that I’d become my Dad, which propelled my knowledge from intellectual and experiential to realized, I’m blown over. The impact of realized knowledge over the other two levels is dramatically greater and the inducement to act on what is seen is also dramatically greater.

(2) I.e., to raise it from intellectual or experiential knowledge to realized knowledge.